M_____ is a film extra with a meagre list of credits to their name and a side career writing obituaries for the Los Angeles Times. M_____ is also dying of cancer at only thirty-two. With the stark reality of death looming overhead, and against the even greater threat of being forgotten, M_____ starts down a strange, fantastic and ultimately tragic path recounting a doomed love affair with the world's greatest living "redshirt" — a man who, over a career spanning two decades, has died or appeared dead in nearly eight hundred film and television roles.

A compelling narrative interspersed with blog fragments and film scripts, The Death Scene Artist is a three-act surrealist exploration of the obsessive fault-finding of body dysmorphia, the internal conflict of gender dysphoria and the dangerous desires of a man who has lived several hundred half-minute lives without having ever experienced his own.

Andrew Wilmot

Andrew Wilmot is a writer, editor and artist living in Toronto, ON. He holds a BFA in Visual Arts (with a minor in Film and Video Studies) and a master's degree in Publishing, both from SFU. In his day job he works as a freelance book reviewer, academic editor, and substantive and copy editor with several independent presses and publications, including the online zine Anathema: Spec from the Margins, for which he is Co-Editor-in-Chief. By night he spends his time writing and painting large, synaesthetic canvases. Much of Andrew's written work focuses on the intersections of art, identity and the body, often with a healthy dose of surrealist horror. To date his work has been published in Found Press, The Singularity, Glittership, Drive In Tales, Turn to Ash, and Those Who Make Us: Canadian Creature, Myth, and Monster Stories, and he was the winner of the 2015 Friends of Merril Short Story Contest. The Death Scene Artist is his first novel.